Planting Iris Seeds!

Today I planted iris seeds! There are a few things that probably bear explaining before I delve in, so here they are:

1) Anatomy of an Iris.

Each iris has three falls (petals that bend down), three standards (petals that go up around the center of the iris), three stamens covered in pollen, and three stigmatic lips, each with a style crest. On each fall is a beard, which can vary greatly in color from the rest of the flower (or not).

2) Where Iris Seeds Come From.

Tall bearded iris have both "male" and "female" parts on each flower - three stamens (male) and three stigmatic lips (female). To cross-pollenate or hybridize iris, you rub the pollen of one on the stigmatic lip on another. This can also be done within the same flower, but that is a bit incestuous and not nearly as exciting. To cross-pollenate, I simply pluck a stamen with tweezers and take it to whatever flower I want to cross it with and rub away. I do this with all 3 stamens and stigmatic lips for the 2 flowers to increase the chances of success. A successful cross-pollenation will result in a seedpod growing from the portion of the bloomstalk where the cross-pollenated flower was located.

Note: In nature, cross-pollenation occurs when insects get pollen on their tiny toes and then land on the stigmatic lip. Several problems are associated with relying on this "natural" process: 1) insects do not label their cross-pollenations, 2) they really don't care which cross-pollenations might result in the most aesthetically pleasing result, and 3) they don't cross-pollenate three times to up the chances of success.

The seedpod takes a certain amount of time to mature on the bloomstalk - a couple of months, mayhap? Sometimes a dog might break the seedpod off the stalk before it's ready, thus rendering your hard work and tender attention to the flower completely futile. But sometimes not, and when the seedpod begins to split open or turn brown it's safe to snap it off and dissect it to extract the seeds. You then let the seeds dry out. You can plant them soon after this, or hold on to them for years.

Plenty of cross-pollenations don't work, or "take", for no reason that I can discern. Less than half of my attempts are successful. If I had to guess, maybe 1/4 of my crosses yield a seedpod. That might be a generous estimate. Estimates are difficult for me. ("How old were you?" "Uh, 10? 11? 12?" "How many people were there?" "Mmm......" "How many pumpkin seeds do you think this is?" "Mmm, 240." "Close, 590.")

[Having a hard time finding a good snap of a seedpod. I'll continue digging through the several computers my pics are scattered across to find one.]

Back to the excitement of planting! Last time I had iris seeds, I planted them and eagerly awaited. I got one seed to sprout little iris leaves out of all the seeds I planted. I don't know if it was the weather or just the fragility of the tiny plant, but it didn't make it longer than a month or so once it grew leaves. Interestingly, each seed in a seedpod can yield a different combination of genes from the cross-pollenation, similar to fraternal twins. Typical seedpod yield might be about 30 seeds, so 30 different flowers are possible! You can imagine my disappointment when every single one doesn't sprout, since each has the potential to be beautifully unique.

This year, after drying out the seeds from the 3 seedpods I got this season, I took half from each seedpod and soaked them in water to return them to their original state, fresh out of seedpod. Somewhere on the internet I read that they need a cold snap before they can germinate in the ground. Since this is Texas, and I'm impatient, I followed the internet's lead and put these soaked seeds in baggies in a wet paper towel (not unlike we all did with pinto beans from the ages of 4-11), carefully labeled them, and placed them in the veggie crisper drawer. A few months later (read: today!) I took 'em out and planted them in organic potting soil in plastic window boxes.

The quality is crap, but here's the size difference between dried-out seeds, and seeds soaked in water or freshly out of a seedpod:

Their time in the crisper drawer should help them to germinate more quickly once in soil, so I'll keep a close eye on them over the next month. I'm hoping the time in the fridge didn't somehow ruin them, although since the internet is never wrong this is patently impossible. I'm planning to plant some of the dry seeds (the other half of the seeds in each seedpod) before we get our first real freeze to see how God's cold snap compares to man's in effectiveness. My money's on man.

The SP on the marker means Seed Parent, and PP means Pollen Parent. Seed parent is the one that grows the pod, or the one the pollen is rubbed on, and pollen parent is the flower from which the pollen was plucked.